Ant

Eclipse itself is using the PDE build infrastructure that it ships with the Plug-in Development Environment. Ant is used to run the build, with adequate plug-points where in you can perform custom tasks such as instrumentation of code.

Eclipse provides a very usable interface for writing ant files(yes, with auto-complete and the stuff) as well as run the ant files from within the IDE. But, for headless(without UI, from command line) builds, you'll need to use the antRunner application provided by eclipse. For more help, peek into the help documentation of eclipse that you are using.

Versioning

Plugins (including features and fragments) must specify their own versions as well as the versions of their dependencies appropriately.

Information

See the eclipse team's plugin-versioning guidelines. You can also ask Pascal Rapicault or John Arthorne for their "Plug-in versioning" presentation.

Tooling

Pascal Rapicault has created an application (org.eclipse.core.runtime.versionchecker.dependencyChecker) to "specify the ranges on all [your] required plug-ins."

Cross-platform build

Eclipse RCP applications can be cross-built for several platforms using any platform on which eclipse runs. You just need to install the RCP delta pack in your Target Platform. If you dont know what a Target Platform is, then just intall the RCP delta pack in your eclipse installation directory. To download the delta pack as per your platform, visit http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/. Click the Release version that you are targeting, then search for 'delta'.